Desktop

When Google announced Chrome OS in 2009, it got a tremendous amount of hype, primarily because it presented a new cloud-centric model for working with applications and unusual approaches to operating system security. Google has had problems, though, translating the hype into a realistic strategy for proliferating Chrome OS-based systems, dubbed Chromebooks. Although Samsung and Acer have steadily backed Chromebooks, they have not made a big splash, and now some analysts are questioning whether Google’s OS will ever become a dominant force.

Kernel Space

While in the weeks since the launch of the AMD FX “Bulldozer” processors we have looked at many areas of computing performance for the FX-8150 CPU, from the compiler tuning to multi-core scaling, one area that hasn’t yet been covered under Linux is the AMD FX-8150 overclocking. But this article changes that.

Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers have developed a new Linux logging system with the aim of replacing syslog. The two Red Hat developers hope that their Journal daemon will resolve a number of perceived problems with syslog, the current industry standard for logging on Unix systems.

The patches for real-time support are now based on a much more recent kernel version. Torvalds has revoked a change merged into 3.2 which had come under widespread criticism from developers. AMD and Intel have released new graphics drivers.

With the release of real-time (RT) kernel 3.0.9-rt25, Thomas Gleixner has declared that the Linux 3.0-based RT tree is now ready for use in live systems. He noted that this new version series represents a major leap forward and that development has run pretty smoothly, despite major revisions to many of the core techniques.

Graphics Stack

Aaron Plattner announced the 290.10 Linux binary driver release with fixing numerous bugs, improving the performance of FBO bind operations under Xinerama (~30%), and support for pre-VBO DrawArrays command in the server-side GLX driver module. Bug/regression fixes make up a majority of the changes.

Over the weekend there was the first X.Org Server 1.12 development snapshot released by Keith Packard. This isn’t an official alpha or beta development build yet, but rather just a snapshot to indicate the current development progress of this next major release. Going forward the plan is to tag such development releases at around the same time there are new stable point releases for the previous series.

Applications

The email client, along with the word processor, is probably one of the most recognisable pieces of software on the desktop. They come in all shapes and sizes, from standalone lightweight command-line clients, to massive personal information managers (PIMs), that do a lot more than just check email.

Proprietary

Regunath Balasubramanian, principal architect of the UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India) said during an event, “The main reason to use OSS (open source software) in the Aadhaar project was not to save cost but to avoid vendor lock-in. And it was important that we have an ability to replace hardware, software or storage.”

Interestingly according to the UIDAI web site there is no metion of any open source technologies used for the project. The only layer which seems to be using some kind of low-level open source is UID Biometric Middleware layer. Rest of the infrastructure is supposedly using proprietary technologies.

In the previous article in this series, we reviewed the different methods of importing footage into Kdenlive, best practises in organizing project files, and the layout and tools provided by Kdenlive. In this article, we will discuss advanced editing techniques and review most of the tools you’ll be using on a day to day basis as a video editor.

Wine

The Wine project developers have released version 1.3.33 of Wine, the latest fortnightly development build. The update improves support for HTTP proxies and introduces support for text output in the DIB engine, part of the display subsystem. Aimed at developers, testers and early adopters, Wine 1.3.33 also includes a new version of the Gecko rendering engine and fixes for bidirectional text layout, as well as various other bugs.

Games

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

Calligra will be replacing Koffice as the official office application for the Chakra KDE SC. It is being to testing for Chakra and all the tests that are being performed are moving it to the forefront of Koffice. Yet, Calligra has not reached a ‘stable’ status.

GNOME Desktop

Red Hat Family

Red Hat’s OpenShift is their new Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud offering. OpenShift makes some big promises: power, speed, openness, and portability, the ultimate fast friendly PaaS. Will it deliver on these promises? Time will tell, and you can start testing it now for free.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

So, you like the idea of deploying an Ubuntu desktop to all or some of your users. You like the way Ubuntu’s light-client model can give your older desktop machines a new lease of life. You like the fact that Ubuntu is secure, portable, and easy to manage. Best of all, you like that it costs nothing to license, and comes with a host of enterprise-grade apps that cost nothing to license either.

The Ubuntu Developer Summit – UDS – is a major event in the Canonical calendar. Taking place every six months, it is the Ubuntu event which defines the focus and plans for our up-coming version of Ubuntu. In the first week of November, over 800 people, from Canonical engineers and employees, Ubuntu community members, partners, ISVs, upstreams and many more gathered to discuss and plan for the upcoming Ubuntu 12.04, code-named Precise Pangolin.

UDS covered 420 sessions, under nine tacks, from desktop to design, community to server and cloud. Attendees worked in the usual collaborative and open environment and spent the week pooling their experience and expertise and sharing best practise resulting, as always, in the very best ideas. Right now, those ideas are are represented in hundreds of blueprint documents and are being put into action by developers, community and Canonical, who are already driving forward for April’s launch. As a practical demonstration of that openness you can track our progress here (note, it’s early days!): http://status.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-precise/.

Canonical is discontinuing its use of CouchDB as part of its Ubuntu One data synchronisation service. The announcement was made by John Lenton, Senior Engineering Manager at Canonical. CouchDB has been used in Ubuntu One to provide a synchronisable way of storing and distributing arbitrary structured data which included contacts, notes and playlists.

Canonical is set to release Ubuntu 11.10, codenamed the Oneiric Ocelot this week, with a key focus on the cloud.

Among the cloud-focused technology components that are set to debut in the new Linux distribution is something that Canonical is branding as Juju. With Juju, Ubuntu is aiming to deliver a cloud orchestration technology for server admins.

In recent weeks Canonical has announced major initiatives to sell Ubuntu PCs in Asia and Europe, just like it tried — and mostly failed — to do five years ago in the United States. But will things be different this time? Here are some thoughts.

Five years ago, when Dell began shipping laptops and desktops in the United States with Ubuntu pre-installed, there were lots of reasons to believe Linux just might take off among the masses. Dell not only offered Ubuntu but actually promoted it for a while. The introduction of Windows Vista around the same time left many consumers eager to consider alternatives to the Microsoft universe.

Recently I ‘upgraded’ to Ubuntu 11.10 and was faced with being, as I thought, ‘forced’ to use Unity if I wanted to stay with Ubuntu in its latest version. Having stuck with Unity for a few weeks I can say that I still dislike it.

I started to look for a solution and fairly quickly found that I had made the same mistake as many other commentators — even in Ubuntu 11.10, Unity is only the default UI. When Ubuntu 11.04 shipped it had the easy fall-back at logon of ‘Ubuntu classic’, which gave users a choice of selecting the GNOME 2 UI at startup. Mark Shuttleworth had said, in the run-up to 11.10, that in Oneiric Ocelot this choice would no longer be available.

It’s official: Canonical’s foray into the world of phones, tablets and even TVs has begun. Or at least, that’s what the introduction of formal development channels for these categories suggests. Here’s the latest, and what it says about Ubuntu’s future.

It’s been pretty clear for a while that Canonical was steering Ubuntu in the direction of portable devices; hence, its focus on the uTouch library for improving touchscreen support on Linux beginning back in 2010 and the introduction of the Unity interface, which aims to cater to screens of all sizes and touchabilities.

Flavours and Variants

I have been playing with couple of distros in the past week. I tried Linux Mint, Fedora 16 and openSUSE (Gnome as well as KDE). I found each distro to be the leader in its own class. For disclosure, I am a long time Ubuntu user and have been switching between Fedora 16 and openSUSE 12.1 ever since they are out. Apart from a few issues there is no major hurdle that keeps me away from any of these distros.

It’s a really good month for Linux distributions. First we got Fedora 16, then openSUSE 12.1, and now we have the preview release of Linux Mint 12. This release has the answer to the question: Just what is the Mint team going to do with the desktop?

With GNOME moving from the 2.x series to 3.x, the big question was whether Linux Mint would find a way to stick with the old school GNOME or move to 3.x. The answer appears to be “yes.” Let me explain.

We are getting close to “perfection” with thin clients and all-in-one computers but this gadget must be “it”. Using only USB power, the thing can run a modern distro like Ubuntu/Linux or Android/Linux and can be used with any PC that can boot a USB drive. It’s still pricey for the material in it. I expect eventually such gadgets will sell for a bit more than a USB drive costs. The HDMI port, card reader, electronics and ARM CPU do cost something but the price should be ~$100 to really hit the market hard. Still, this thing will sell and widely.

Intel released an update to its Linux-based, Intel Atom-focused Intel Embedded Software Development Tool Suite, adding support for the Yocto 1.1 embedded tookit. Version 2.3 supports the latest Intel Atom models and optimizations, and updates components including the compiler, performance libraries, and analysis and debug tools, says the company.

Phones

HP is still quietly shopping webOS around among with other Palm assets, according to sources, but insisting that potential buyers of the platform agree to license it back for use in future HP printers. Intel has just entered discussions with HP, a source close to the negotiations spilled to VentureBeat, while Qualcomm – despite sidestepping any suggestions of interest in webOS – is also said to be still in the running.

Android

After years of considering how to best get into the phone business, Facebook has tapped Taiwanese cellphone maker HTC to build a smartphone that has the social network integrated at the core of its being.

Steve Wozniak is the genius, the mad engineer who created what we call today Personal Computers or PCs. He co-founded Apple with the other Steve whose skill were around creating business model around anything.

A couple of years ago, there was much debate about whether Android would inspire the kind of inspiration among app developers that developers have for Apple’s iOS. There were even those who said that no app ecosystem would come close to Apple’s App Store. Today, though, Android apps are flourishing, and you may very well run them already on a phone, a tablet or both. Did you know, though, that you can run them on a computer as well? While it only works on Windows at this point (it is coming soon in a Mac version), BlueStacks App Player lets you do so.

The Galaxy Nexus is almost here, but even if you’re not in the market for a new phone you can sate your Ice Cream Sandwich appetite a little thanks to an XDA developers user, who extracted the keyboard application from Android 4.0 and made it available as a free download for Android 2.2 and 2.3. It’s not the full 4.0 experience — voice input isn’t working, and not all languages were ported over — but the keyboard’s improved autocorrection, new look and feel, and a few other features came over in the transfer. We installed the keyboard on a Droid X2 running Gingerbread, and it activated and worked seamlessly.

Ask him where he sees Android headed, and he’s confident that the open source mobile operating system will be ubiquitous, powering digital devices across the board – from fridges and heaters to every kind of mobile device there is.

“We’ll see it power everything … even cars, maybe,” says the 24-year-old Android developer from Portugal. In Bangalore to attend and deliver the keynote address at Droidcon India, the first-ever international Android conference in the country, Diogo Ferreira is convinced that Android has the potential to transform the digital world as we know it. For instance, he talks about a CISCO gadget presentation where he saw a smartphone with a tablet built into it (that’s made on Android), so when you’re going for a meeting you can simply pick up the tablet from the phone and proceed. Being open sourced, Android, he believes, has the potential to go places. “The exciting thing is that it’s so open that if someone wants to, they can simply take the code and take it in any direction.”

Automotive electronics are becoming more sophisticated each year, and it’s reaching the point at which some cars may soon need built-in operating systems in order for people to use them properly. Not too far in the future, if you buy a new car, you may find that Android or a Linux-based OS is riding shotgun.

Events

The eighth edition of Open Source India, a technology event that is focussed on the open source technology space, will be held from November 20 to 22 at the NIMHANS Convention Centre, Bangalore. Started in 2004 as Linux Asia, this is among the largest open source conferences in Asia.

Web Browsers

Chrome

Google is working on an alternative technique aimed at tangibly speeding up response times for interactive JavaScript applications in Chrome. Although Google’s V8 JavaScript Engine has made steady progress in the way it processes the scripting language in the past, interactive applications such as Google Maps, games like Angry Birds and WebGL experiments place additional demands on the engine. A new incremental garbage collector is aimed at improving “interactive performance”.

Mozilla

Mozilla has released the first maintenance update to version 8 of its open source Firefox web browser. According to the release notes, Firefox 8.0.1 is a minor release that addresses two crashing bugs though there are 13 bugs listed as known issues that are “to be fixed in future versions”.

Databases

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

Please, tell us something about you and your activities? And how you became involved with Open Source Software and LibreOffice?

I started to get involved with Open Source when I was still a student. I got involved quite a bit with Gentoo (the Linux distribution) in its early days, somewhere around Gentoo 1.2. I even wrote some tools for it, only to scratch my personal itch, but it seems that for example ‘etc-proposals’ is still quite popular. I kept being involved in Open Source, although my first job after graduating from the university was not Open Source related. In 2008 I joined Sun’s OpenOffice Writer team, motivated by the opportunity to work on one of the biggest – and most important – Open Source projects in the world. I learned quite a lot about the codebase and the product there and in turn could bring in some experience from the sometimes chaotic, but always dynamic ways of Open Source projects. As of February 2011 I am employed by Canonical and take care of LibreOffice releases on Ubuntu. Since that date I am contributing code changes directly to LibreOffice. Later I also joined the Engineering Steering Committee of LibreOffice.

As was noted in Google’s filing last Friday with respect to the proposed trial plan [PDF; Text] the reexaminations of the six asserted Oracle patents are currently running largely in Google’s favor. [Note: a seventh patent, the '447 patent which remains in reexamination is no longer being asserted by Oracle.] Google argues that this should sway the court in favor of staying at least the patent infringement action until final determinations on each of these reexaminations by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

The most recent action by the USPTO has been the issuance of an Action Closing Prosecution on the ’720 patent. ACP Dated 11-18-2011 [PDF]. In that action the USPTO maintains its rejection of all of the contested claims of the ’720 patent, including the six claims asserted in the litigation. Oracle has 30 days in which to respond to the ACP and attempt to convince the examiner that the decision is misplaced.

Funding

The co-founder of Google Sergey Brin has donated $500,000 to Wikipedia Foundation. Sergey made the donation via his The Brin Wojcicki Foundation. The foundation was started by Google co-founder Sergey Brin and 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki.

BSD

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

What Stallman wrote was “Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died … we all deserve the end of Jobs’ malign influence on people’s computing. / Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective.”

In a follow-up, Stallman expanded his argument: “The important thing about Jobs is what he directed Apple to do to those who are still living: to make general-purpose computers with digital handcuffs more controlling and unjust than ever before … Jobs saw how to make these computers stylish and smooth. That would normally be positive, but not in this case, since it has the paradoxical effect of making their controlling nature seem acceptable.”

Project Releases

Public Services/Government

In this age of austerity, public sector IT leaders are constantly looking for alternative solutions to deliver more with less.

In this context, it is perhaps surprising that the government’s overall approach to open-source solutions has been lukewarm to say the least, especially by comparison with other European countries including the Netherlands and France, which have embraced open source to deliver greater value through collaboration and efficiency to the taxpayer.

Fox-IT was contracted by the Netherlands National Communications Security Agency to make security modifications to OpenVPN, a leading open-source VPN product, which make the software suitable for government employee use. This development ensures that Dutch government employees can securely access work files outside their office.

Licensing

Since the source code is usually available, software under a free or open open source license can be re-used within another software project rather easily. That is, after all, the whole point of FLOSS. But the potential for FLOSS license violations within software projects is, like any other license, always there.

Critics of FLOSS licenses are usually quick to point out that the very openness of FLOSS source code actually promotes more license violations. Protect yourself, these critics urge, and avoid FLOSS altogether–or at the very least purchase commercial compliance services and products.

Open Hardware

During my interview with Cousins at the Compass Summit he speculated that an open-source software base could provide a boost to the robotics industry, similar to how Apple’s App Store creates more utility for iPhones and how video game attachments support particular games.

Programming

A new open source JavaScript library claims to offer 90 per cent of the popular jQuery library’s functionality at only 13 per cent of the size. jQuip – JQuery-in-parts – is small enough that it can be included as source to avoid external references in web pages, according to the developers. It offers the $() selector syntax and methods including each, attr, bind, unbind, append, prepend, before, after and many more. It also supports a wide range of events and static methods. Plugins allow jQuip to expand its capability to detect documentReady and perform CSS manipulation and Ajax calls. Any call not implemented currently throws a “not implemented” exception. The animation methods hide, show, fadeIn and fadeOut work, but do not animate.

The PyPy development team has released version 1.7 of its “very compliant” Python interpreter with integrated tracing just-in-time (JIT) compiler. The developers say that the focus of the new update was widening the range of code that PyPy can speed up, which the developers refer to as the “sweet spot”. In their benchmarks, PyPy 1.7 performs approximately 30 per cent faster than 1.6 and “up to 20 times faster on some benchmarks”.

Developer tools have benefited more from the free and open source software revolution than any other category of software. When I was learning C programming in the early 1990s, Borland’s offer of an integrated MS-DOS C compiler, editor, debugger, and linker for $150 came as a revelation. Developer tools for commercial Unix systems cost thousands.

Standards/Consortia

HTML5 development tool provider appMobi is putting together a Black Friday deal for programmers as it open-sources many key HTML5 technologies that it hopes should help spur on the building of more mobile web apps. AppMobi is trying to help accelerate the market for HTML5 mobile apps and at the same time position itself to be a sort of Heroku or Red Hat for mobile HTML5.

One of the things I’m most passionate about in my current role is the social benefits of the Digital Agenda. Because new technology isn’t just about boosting our growth and productivity: it also offers significant opportunities to protect and include everyone in our society.

In particular, technology can help the elderly: because by innovating we can address the challenges of ageing. In an initiative led by the EU, we’ve just agreed some very clear actions so we can do this. Actions with a positive impact for older people, and those who live with and care for them.

For example, did you know that falls are the leading cause of injuries among the elderly? By preventing falls through early diagnosis and screening, technology can lead to an amazing decrease in the number of elderly people who need to be treated after an accident. This means more elderly people can keep their independence longer – and also reduces the burden on our stretched health and social care systems. Most of all, it could have a lasting impact on how we value and interact with the older generation.

New technologies can promise these kinds of changes – and many others besides. But it takes a whole range of people to deliver them. After all, innovation in this area could come from anywhere – doctors, carers, governments, the ICT industry, entrepreneurs, or the elderly themselves. To make progress, and to deliver the kind of changes that really help those in the care frontline, we need cooperation and mutual understanding between all those groups.

“Virus companies are playing on your fears to try to sell you bs protection software for Android, RIM, and iOS,” DiBona charged. “They are charlatans and scammers. If you work for a company selling virus protection for Android, RIM, or iOS you should be ashamed of yourself.”

Finance

Democratic Florida Congressional Rep. Ted Deutch has proposed an amendment to the Constitution of the United States outlawing corporate money in politics and ending so-called “corporate personhood”, according to Talking Points Memo.

Civil Rights

The Internet Blacklist Legislation – known as PROTECT IP Act in the Senate and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House – is a threatening sequel to last year’s COICA Internet censorship bill. Like its predecessor, this legislation invites Internet security risks, threatens online speech, and hampers Internet innovation. Urge your members of Congress to reject this Internet blacklist campaign in both its forms!

Internet/Net Neutrality

Paris, 18th of November 2011 – Nicolas Sarkozy is attempting a sleight of hand at today’s G8/G20 Forum d’Avignon on culture, economy and the media: posing as the defender of digital culture and the Internet. La Quadrature du Net reminds of his disastrous record, and calls on citizens to judge by themselves with the upcoming votes in the Council of the EU and the European Parliament, in particular on the anti-counterfeiting ACTA agreement.

Last week, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission released its much-anticipated usage based billing decision. While the ruling only focused on the use of data caps (or UBB) as between Internet providers, the issue garnered national attention with over 500,000 Canadians signing a petition against Internet data caps and the government providing clear signals that it would overrule the Commission if it maintained its support for the practice.

My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) notes the resulting decision seemed to cause considerable confusion as some headlines trumpeted a “Canadian compromise,” while others insisted that the CRTC had renewed support for UBB. Those headlines were wrong. The decision does not support UBB at the wholesale level (the retail market is another story) and the CRTC did not strike a compromise. Rather, it sided with the independent Internet providers by developing the framework the independents had long claimed was absent – one based on the freedom to compete.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

Koha is a free library management system created by the Horowhenua Library Trust in New Zealand. This software has been the subject of an ongoing fight with a US company called LibLime, which seems to want to take the software proprietary; LWN reported on this dispute in 2010.

Copyrights

People have come to see copyright as a tool of punishment, Europe’s technology chief has said in her strongest-yet attack on the current copyright system.

Digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes said on Saturday that the creative industries had to embrace rather than resist new technological ways of distributing artistic works. She added that the existing copyright system was not rewarding the vast majority of artists.

“Is the current copyright system the right and only tool to achieve our objectives? Not really,” Kroes said in a speech to the Forum D’Avignon thinktank. “Citizens increasingly hear the word copyright and hate what is behind it.”

The EU’s Digital Agenda Commissioner, Neelie Kroes, has criticised the current system for the protection of intellectual property rights. In her traditional speech at a cultural and media forum in Avignon on Saturday, the Dutch politician said that the millions of dollars invested trying to enforce copyright have not stemmed piracy. Speaking with unusual frankness, Kroes said that citizens increasingly hear the word copyright and hate what is behind it. “Sadly, many see the current system as a tool to punish and withhold, not a tool to recognise and reward [creative work]“, she added.

What do you think of, when you think of copyright? A tool to recognise and reward artists? Or a tool to punish and withhold material?

For me the answer should clearly be the first. But all too often, in the digital age, it is seen as the second.

Our current copyright system is not succeeding in its objectives. I agree we should fight against piracy. But it’s becoming increasingly hard to legally enforce copyright rules, a battle that costs millions of dollars with little signs of victory.

The lunacy of the EPO with its patent maximalism will likely go unchecked (and uncorrected) if Battistelli gets his way and turns the EPO into another SIPO (Croatian in the human rights sense and Chinese in the quality sense)

Another long installment in a multi-part series about UPC at times of post-truth Battistelli-led EPO, which pays the media to repeat the lies and pretend that the UPC is inevitable so as to compel politicians to welcome it regardless of desirability and practicability

Implementing yet more of his terrible ideas and so-called 'reforms', Battistelli seems to be racing to the bottom of everything (patent quality, staff experience, labour rights, working conditions, access to justice etc.)

"Good for trolls" is a good way to sum up the Unitary Patent, which would give litigators plenty of business (defendants and plaintiffs, plus commissions on high claims of damages) if it ever became a reality

Microsoft's continued fascination with and participation in the effort to undermine Alice so as to make software patents, which the company uses to blackmail GNU/Linux vendors, widely acceptable and applicable again